Mud Sweeter Than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania, by Margo Rejmer, translated from the Polish by Zasia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-JonesUsed and new at SecondSale.com What was meant to be has already happened.Time smooths out the edges of our recollections; the past is distorted by the weight of the present. Albania isn't a country I... Continue Reading →
Women Who Survived the Gulag, in Their Own Words
Book review: Dressed for a Dance in the Snow, by Monika Zgustova (Amazon / Book Depository) I am not that woman. It must be someone else who is suffering. I could never withstand it. Monika Zgustova, a Czech author based in Spain, gives voices to female former Gulag prisoners (and in one case, a woman... Continue Reading →
Survivors’ Stories from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society
Book review: Before and After, by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate (Amazon / Book Depository) Author Lisa Wingate wrote a popular novel in 2017, Before We Were Yours, a fictionalized story about children adopted from the notorious Tennessee Children's Home Society ("TCHS"). Starting in the 1920s through 1950, a woman named Georgia Tann ran this "questionable"... Continue Reading →
Oral Histories from “The Last of the Soviets” #WITMonth
Book review: Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon / Book Depository) In writing, I’m piecing together the history of “domestic,” “interior” socialism. As it existed in a person’s soul. I’ve always been drawn to this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens. 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time is... Continue Reading →
Voices of the Second World War’s Children, Curated by Svetlana Alexievich
Book review: Last Witnesses, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon / Book Depository) These pictures, these lights. My riches. The treasure of what I lived through... Last Witnesses is the latest work from incomparable Belarusian journalist and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich to be translated from Russian to English. In the vein of her other books, this oral... Continue Reading →
Nonfiction Titles Celebrating Women in Translation Month
August is Women in Translation month, an annual celebration of writing by women translated into English. I'm late to be sharing anything about this, but in case you can still catch something, bookstores often spotlight titles and hold sales, host special events and readings, and many publishers offer discounts on titles by women in translation.... Continue Reading →
Zora Neale Hurston Curates a Life Story Spanning Africa, the Middle Passage, and the Jim Crow South
Book review: Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston (Amazon / Book Depository) Though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going. It may be true, and often is, that every person we hold dear... Continue Reading →
Monologues on Chernobyl and What Came After
Book review: Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon / Book Depository) Sometimes it’s as though I hear his voice. Alive. Even photographs don’t have the same effect on me as that voice. But he never calls out to me . . . not even in my dreams. I’m the one who calls to him.... Continue Reading →
Women’s Voices Tell the Stories of Russia at War
Book review: The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Amazon Yet another book about war? What for? There have been a thousand wars—small and big, known and unknown. And still more has been written about them. But…it was men writing about men—that much was clear at once. Everything we know about war we know... Continue Reading →